Sanitized for Someone's Protection

Salon (if you don't subscribe, today's day pass is pretty short) discusses the Abu Ghraib photos in the broader context of reportage from the front:

"I certainly think we've seen an extremely sanitized version of the war," says Peter Howe, author of "Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer." "There are very few images of Iraq casualties, let alone American casualties; and it's a real problem because as a nation we are consistently unprepared for the reality of war. Unless we understand the full implication of our actions, as a democracy we can't make a reasonable assessment of when it's the right time to go to war. If war is divorced from daily life, as a video game [is], we can't make judgments, and we find ourselves mired in something we did not expect."

Howe notes that unlike during the first Gulf War when battlefield images were tightly controlled -- even censored -- by the U.S. military, photographers in Iraq, whether embedded or unilateral, have had complete freedom to shoot whatever they wanted. Yet he suggests that the mainstream media's images remain oddly uniform and, until very recently, clean and simplistic. "There's censorship being applied, but by the media itself," says Howe. "Everybody is running scared."

Link is courtesy of Angry Arab News Service, who is quoted in the article:

"Americans see a bloodless, victimless war, unless when Americans die, and then we don't see any pictures at all," adds As'ad AbuKhalil, author of "Bin Laden, Islam, and America's New 'War on Terrorism.'" "Patriotism really challenges the journalism standards we've seen," says AbuKhalil, an expert on Arab media who teaches politics at California State University at Stanislaus.

So much for the So Called Liberal Media...